The lesson idea is a simple enough one: engage students in the non-fiction that they have been reading and set the stage for reading the novel with power. My school librarian located Sherjan via the internet, and he agreed to speak with my class. WOW!!!

You can find a handout attached which shows the story of his life as well as the prompt for my students to generate questions for discussion (SL.9-10.1). I am so excited that they get to take part in this because a key point in PBL learning is to bring in a local expert. We started the unit with QFT question-generating prompt which got our inquiry going, and now having a local/national expert on hand will add further legitimacy to the work that we are doing--particularly as we examine the description of Afghan culture in the novel (RL.9-10.6) and corroborate that description with the comments made by our speaker.

Resources

I asked the librarian to set up a conference room with the students in rows, and I will be checking in their work as the enter the room, making sure that each of them have read the article and that each of them have brainstormed for a set of questions for Sherjan. I want to make sure that this session is worth his time as well as theirs, so that is why I am setting expectations for a strong discussion (SL.9-10.1).

Here is a brief clip of the actual discussion, although I expect that setting up your own live expert is much more powerful.